The thalamus has been described as the “eyeball” or “projection screen” of the brain, monitoring the continuously evolving cortical activity that may be thought of as the brain's “multimedia show,” while also serving as a trigger for global or “volume” release of neurotransmitters into the cortex. When attempts are made to build artificial neural systems approaching the size and complexity of the human cortex, memory and processors are so heavily taxed that any monitoring algorithm needs to run either intermittently as a separate thread or process on the same computational platform. Furthermore, as these synthetic cortical systems become more extensive and complex it becomes increasingly difficult to isolate the formation of associative chains that reveal important relationships or the emergence of novel patterns tantamount to ideas and improvisational strategies. Should the monitoring thalamic portion be run on a separate platform, communication is limited by serial protocols (e.g., TCP/IP over Ethernet) that must transmit billions of bytes of information to broadcast just one of myriad states of the cortical algorithm. In the first case of intermittent execution of the monitoring algorithm, valuable activation patterns may be missed within the cortical algorithm. In the second case of threads executing the thalamic algorithm in parallel with the cortical, the states of the synthetic cortex must be passed via immense data structures, resulting in significant delays in the evaluation of cortical activation patterns. The same may be said of transmission protocols between separate machines.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,659,666, simulated volume release of neurotransmitters was controlled through at least one critic or neural net that was capable of graduating mean synaptic perturbation level to create more “twisted” pattern-based notions until it was ‘satisfied’ with one or more of them. Later, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,454,388, those false memories deemed valuable or useful by this critic were reinforced in a process that simulates serotonin and dopamine release preparatory to the brain's memorization of useful confabulations. That system thus bootstraps itself through cycles of idea generation followed by memorization of such notions, along the way hybridizing ideas into more useful or interesting concepts. However, such systems were restricted in part by typical processing bottlenecks.